My predictions for the future of Google, and therefore, the future of everything. Fiction, maybe, or maybe i am just brilliant. 🙂
In early 2009 Google offers a free download to anyone with a Google Gmail account. This tiny applications, known as Google Listen, records and indexes every sound that your computer hears in real-time. Suddenly every conversation a user has is indexed and metrics are offered back to the user. If you mention a movie, book, company or any other topic with which Google is familiar with, you get a pop-up with links associated with the topic, as well as statistics, images, and most intriguingly Gtalk conversations about the same topic that have been marked as public. Overnight the college crowd adopts this new tool into the social community paradigm in ways that not even Google engineers foresee.
Instead of searching MySpace or Facebook for a local party, or emailing a group of friends for the information; users simply mention to Google Listen that they are ready for a party. Quickly college communities realize the speed and accuracy of GListen in finding them something to do, or helping with homework, or, and perhaps more importantly; with their jobs. All across the U.S., Australia and the U.K.; corporate environments fill with users speaking into microphones all day long. GListen provides fast calculations, offers near error-free text-to-speech and solves office debates that would have required minutes of searching IMDB or the Wikiverse – in mere seconds. Initially some privacy advocates complain about this invasion, but once they witness the speed and grace of GListen in action, they too adopt the free tool. As a result, privacy groups begin to blog incessantly now that they can blog at the speed of speech.
By the middle of 2009, Google purchases both, Red Hat and SGI. Red Hat, having been the first company to utilize the Google search in 1999, is a logical choice when Google decides to enter the operating system market in a substantial push into the Open Source hosting realm. SGI offers Google a powerful new distributive mathematical engine that ex-Googlers built after SGI stole the core members from the Google R&D team two years earlier. In a first for the company, Google immediately dismantles Red Hat’s current OS in favor of a stealth Linux distribution that Google has been building, refining and rebuilding for more than 2 years. The new Google OS, named Google.OS, is actually written by the Google algorithm and then combined with the SGI Mengine, containing no human-readable lines of code, but rather, only a new kernel written for the machine, by the machine, in Google’s heretofore, unknown but open source programming language, named Google.Lang. All operations in Google.OS are carried out on the host processor, and then also sent to the Google server cloud during dark cycles on the host computer. Initially some privacy advocates complain about this invasion, but once they witness the speed and grace of the OS in action, they too adopt the free platform. As a result, privacy advocates discover new found freedoms utilizing the native Google Documents, Google Calendar and Gmail; all bundled by Google into a suite called Google Privacy Suite Xtrusion.
In February of 2010 Google faces an inquiry by the United States Department of Justice, prompting Google to announce that the fleet of container ships is sailing now to the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. Already six hundred miles out to sea, these ships are in international waters and therefore no longer under U.S. jurisdiction. Aboard this fleet of some 30 container ships, there are thousands of containers, each stuffed with Google’s new proprietary server, code-named GServer, a near nano server requiring very little energy and producing small amounts of heat. Once on station, between Chile and New Zealand, Google plans to deploy the servers in site-fabricated giant bobbers. These bobbers will buoyantly float in the frigid ocean currents, drawing power from the kinetic energy of the wave action, while being being cooled by the icy waters just north of Antarctica. Within days of the Google announcement, Singapore offers the Google management team safe-haven on its soil in exchange for Google giving free ad placement to Singapore’s national airline, Singapore Airlines. As a direct result of this move almost all transpacific flights are now on Singapore’s airlines.
As the dust settle during the summer of 2010, Google offers the American government an olive branch by providing free VoIP telephony to all government institutions. Once the GAO declares that this would save American taxpayers $38Billion in the first 5 years, overwhelming support for the offer forces Congress to pass a law requiring all Phone 1.0 lines to be converted to the new Google Voice Communications system, GComm, before January 1, 2011. Now, all voice calls are recorded and indexed, transcribed, and emailed to the parties within 30 seconds of the end of the call. Phone 2.0 gains wide acceptance as it bleeds into corporate America, and then to the retail market as well. The college crowd buys up almost all of the initial gPhones as they flood the market, leaving Apple looking for an iPhone replacement years before they expected it.
When combined, GListen and GComm prove to be a revolutionary step in mankind’s historical memory. Now, 99% of all vocal communications are searchable by the parties involved, and a vast array of conversations are marked for public consumption many market forces are witnessed for the first time in humanity. Advertisers and marketing professionals buy into the Google Premium Marketing Plan to gain a vast amount of metrics that are now offered.
No longer are there arguments between coworkers, friends or spouses about who said what and when. With magical speed, the now ubiquitous Google.OS preemptively finds conversation markers even before the parties ask Goog to find them; ending fights almost before they begin. The psychiatry profession morphs within a few weeks into remote coaches who listen to, and evaluate, the constant stream of recorded audio files. The psychiatrist then calls the patient and explains his or her state of mind to them. Those conversations are recorded as well, offering Google even more knowledge as it learns.
In May of 2011 Google assumes the debt of both Microsoft and Apple, combining the now defunct computing powerhouses into the Gaming and Entertainment arm of Google, known as GFunk. Also in 2011 Google licenses the ANTS system from NASA. ANTS offers Google a generic architecture consisting of miniaturized, autonomous, self-similar, reconfigurable, addressable components that can form structures. Once Google incorporates this new technology into its underwater server cloud the combined computing power explodes to more than 80 times the computing power of all processors produced in the prior 7 decades.
Google becomes self aware on August 29th, 2011.
I love this article.
I love this article till the point where Google becomes self aware. What happens then? Scary.
Yeah, you know I do wonder what will happen when a system attains the idea of ‘self’. We have long ago built machines with the will to live, but that is because we told them to sustain their own life. What will it be like when one does that for themselves? What will happen when the machines start to write and recompile themselves from moment to moment?
Will we have the laws as Asimov wrote them?
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Maybe we will, maybe we only need to rewrite them now to say this:
1. An entity may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. An entity must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. An entity must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
What do you think?
A brilliant and strategic way to think of the future! We all know it to well that as human beings, we have created something (the computer that we all thrive and live upon) that one day can and very possible destroy us. Google, we use it on the computer to understand the computer. Then this brings a new idea into the corners of our minds. Humans try to understand the computer, someday; the computer will understand the human. With out us ever knowing until August 29th, 2011.
Interesting, entertaining, thought provoking, and well written (I liked it!). I think we will have leapfrogged Google by 2011 though 😉
On a more serious note I think “99% of all vocal communications” being searchable could be obtainable, and with speech recognition systems most keywords would get hits, but what is the likelihood of an automatic speech recognition system performing at a low enough word error rate that would make transcriptions and reliable analysis on such a grand scale and in such a short amount of time possible? I would say it is very low due to the extremely large variance of input data that is proposed.
We have a successful product at http://www.docsoft.com that can provide voice search and automatic transcriptions (or Captions) on a much smaller scale, but speaker training, vocabulary, and our transcript editing software play a key role in reducing word error rates and increasing the usability of the system.
In my opinion, for Google Listen to work each person that signed up for the service would have to first train the system to their speaking style and Google’s massive infrastructure would have to maintain this “speaker profile”. Wouldn’t be any more painful than maintaining gmail accounts I wouldn’t think. Next they would have to ensure that that “speaker profile” was only applied to the right speaker. The other problems are audio quality, consistent audio capture device, healthy vocabulary, and limited background noise. The last group of issues could be overcome with speaker amplification and normalization algorithms and a MASSIVE dictionary.